EMC has unveiled an assortment of products and solutions designed to connect primary storage and data protection systems to private and public clouds. “Cloud has become a strategic imperative for our customers,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, SVP, EMC Core Technologies. And, one of the things that EMC often hears from customers, he said, is that even if they don’t want to use it today, they want to know that they have the option to do so in the future if they choose.
Three Critical Customer Requirements
Right now, there are three things that come up all the time in customer engagements, noted Ratcliffe.
In terms of storage, customers want vendors to simplify and automate storage environments and make it easier to manage because they find it too complex; they want a path to the cloud; and in many cases they don’t want to have to buy new hardware, learn new processes or buy new tools. What they want is very much like what Apple provides with the iCloud, said Ratcliffe, where you take an existing device and make some software changes to provide new capabilities.
Along with those three there is also always the requirement for data protection no matter where data resides.
“Data is the new currency,” said Ratcliffe. “When you talk to startups they say that their value is the data that they have. You have to protect your data, and you don’t get a choice about it, and it doesn’t matter where it is.” That is the clear message from customers, said Ratcliffe: "Give me a path to the cloud and protect my data wherever it is."
With the new offerings, EMC is introducing integrated and extended cloud capabilities across its storage and data protection portfolio to store and protect data to, from and within the cloud; providing out-of-the-box enterprise cloud solutions for EMC VMAX and EMC VNX with expanded support for private and public cloud services; and expanding data protection features to ensure data is protected wherever it resides.
Tiering Data to/from the Cloud
EMC’s VMAX and VNX storage platforms deliver automated tiering to and from private and public clouds, and EMC is further extending the integration reach of VMAX with enhancements to its FAST.X tiering solution, enabling customers to achieve lower total cost of ownership by automatically tiering to public clouds from both EMC and non-EMC storage. Both VMAX – with new integrated cloud tiering – and VNX– leveraging new cloud tiering – now offer expanded support for private and public cloud providers. EMC now supports VMware vCloud Air, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Platform – all while delivering the performance and peace of mind that customers expect from enterprise storage.
Protecting Data to/from the Cloud
CloudBoost 2.0 extends customers’ existing EMC data protection solutions, including the Data Protection Suite and Data Domain, to cloud storage, enabling customers to leverage the economic benefits of the public cloud for long-term data retention. CloudBoost now features enhanced overall performance, scalability and manageability, making it easier for customers to cache data locally and move it to the cloud. CloudBoost offers 3x faster throughput and 15x more data capacity than previous versions. Additionally, CloudBoost enables deduplication and incremental restores simultaneously, without the need for complex cloud compute infrastructure.
Protecting Data in the Cloud
Spanning by EMC now features enhanced restore and security capabilities along with new regional deployment within the European Union. Spanning Backup for Salesforce delivers enhanced SaaS data restoration capabilities making it easier for customers to quickly and easily restore lost or deleted data, while new European data destination option helps organizations comply with European data sovereignty laws and regulations.
Data Protection as a Service
EMC service providers and EMC customers who deploy data protection as a Service (DPaaS) in their own private clouds can now take advantage of new features being introduced into the latest version of the Data Domain operating system DD OS 5.7, including enhanced capacity management, secure multi-tenancy, and a dense shelf configuration that dramatically reduces total cost of ownership.
Simplified Data Protection Management
EMC is also announcing a new release of its NetWorker data protection software, NetWorker 9, which introduces a new universal policy engine that automates and simplifies the data protection process regardless of where the data resides. NetWorker 9 now also integrates with EMC ProtectPointand delivers integrated block-level protection for Microsoft and Linux environments.
For more information, go to www.emc.com.